The fragmentation theory

It is becoming commonly acceptable that many Arab countries are heading towards partition.

Analysts claim that any future settlement of the crises in Syria, Libya, Iraq and even Yemen may have to include dividing those countries along ethnic or sectarian lines.

Some even affirm that some of those countries, practically, if not officially, are already divided.

This may realistically apply to the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, which may end up as an autonomous entity within the Iraqi republic or seek larger independence.

It is too early to make credible predictions regarding the future while the situation in all the concerned countries is still so volatile.

Theories about redrawing the lines in the Middle East have been circulating for a long time. 

When, for consecutive decades, a prominent Princeton historian like Bernard Lewis kept hammering the idea of an inevitable future war between the Christian West and the world of Islam, many, including myself, believed he simply was trying to distance the Israeli factor from the rising conflict and instability in the Middle East, going on since the early beginnings of the 20th century. 

Lewis’s idea was further propagated by political scientist Samuel Huntington in his “Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of World Order”, which quickly caught particular attention soon after its publication in 1996. 

Huntington’s theme was first introduced in a “Foreign Affairs” article he had published in 1993.

Huntington’s hypothetical prediction is that the next stage of world history will be shaped by cultural as well as civilisational conflicts and contradictions rather than by the ideological, political and economic factors that governed international affairs during the cold war era.

Although recognising the existence of a number of other important civilisations — the Latin American, the Orthodox world of the former Soviet Union, the Eastern, Buddhist, Chinese, Hindu and Japanese —Huntington lays particular emphasis on the Islamic civilisation and the Muslim world, arguing that civilisational conflicts are particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims and identifying the bloody lines between Islamic and non-Islamic civilisations.

Both Lewis and Huntington trace this conflict’s origins to 1,300 years ago, to the final thrust of Islam into Europe and the attacks of the Ottoman Turks in Eastern Europe and Vienna. 

Lewis insists, as I heard from him directly, that the Crusades were the Christian European response to early Islamic conquests. He holds on to the belief that Muslims are yet to retaliate against the West for their, and their civilisation’s, former setbacks. 

Soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the New York City Twin Towers, Lewis wrote that that act of terror was the first volley of a war Islam was starting against the Western world.

Unfortunately, what had been invented as a hypothetical thesis deliberately designed to serve certain political objectives, mainly to distance notions pointing fingers to Israel and the Zionist project in Palestine as the source of all trouble, turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The many raging conflicts all over the region, the expansion of religion-related terrorist acts in and far beyond the Middle East, as well as the exclusionist manifestations of jihadist groups against non-Muslims, all point to a very alarming future of what may look like religiously motivated large scale wars.

If that turns out to be true — let us hope it will not — it is not because the Lewis-Huntington thesis was right; rather, and most likely, it is the inevitable result of decades-long build-up of relentless efforts to create the conditions and the environment conducive to precipitating such a disastrous state of affairs.

But what is happening in the region now — the rise of the most extremist and murderous terrorist organisations, specifically Daesh, which commits its horrifying crimes in the name of the noble faith of Islam, and the expansion of its indiscriminate terrorist attacks against innocent civilians, including Muslim victims, in many countries worldwide — may lead many to believe that Islam is at war with the rest of the world and that the conflicts are of religious (Christian -Muslim), sectarian (Sunni-Shiite) and ethnic (Arab-Kurdish) nature.

That is definitely not the case.

Daesh and its ilk are the bitter product, indeed a malignant side effect, of abnormal conditions and situations developing in the region for many decades. 

Being a tiny minority, relatively, their crimes should not implicate a nation of one-and-a-half billion Muslims which clearly condemn their deplorable conduct.

Eventually, such lethal manifestations, mainly Daesh, will be defeated, as major efforts are already under way to stem and destroy the fast-spreading threat. 

But such an effort, if meant to succeed, should be coupled with a long-term and sustained parallel effort to address the root causes, the conditions and the circumstances that helped before, and are still helping, the creation of such evil ideologies, the causes of the prevailing instability and violence.

There must be a wide range of measures to be considered.

Redrawing the lines on sectarian basis in the troubled countries of Syria and Iraq, for example, as many analysts preach, should be excluded because that will only deepen, rather than reduce, tensions and rifts.

If Sykes and Picot did create “artificial” Arab states, as some observers continue to assert, it was not because the related countries included different religious or ethnic groups. It was because the Arab countries were not all united in one independent kingdom as the Arabs were demanding and as the British had promised Sharif Hussein at the time.

Any calls to separate different religious or ethnic groups will be running against the normal course of history, especially in a globalised world where every member state in the United Nations includes within its borders citizens of various religious and ethnic affiliations and yet they live peacefully together as equal citizens before the law of the land.

It is not because the human components in the trouble-stricken Arab countries failed to live in peace together that trouble emerged.

The trouble has been caused by the countless external factors in which the creation of Israel and the continuing Israeli aggression is key, and the 2003 war on Iraq was a culmination.

Just as I was writing, I came across a very extensive The New York Times article last Saturday which took me most of the day to finish reading (“Fractured lands, how the Arab world came apart”, by Scott Anderson), blaming the 2003 war on Iraq for all the current chaos in the entire region.

The article explains in full detail the elements that helped the rise of Daesh, its swift victories in Iraq and Syria, the instant collapse of the Iraqi army in Nineveh in the face of no more that 1,500 irregular Daesh fighters, the billions-worth military gear they seized in Iraq and the ready to join desperate recruits.

The article also illustrates with stunning photos the misery of the victims and the displaced, and reveals the barbaric atrocities and massacres committed by Daesh fighters against Yazidis and many others, including Muslims.

Separating people from each other in fragmented and artificial creations will miss the point miserably.

It will recognise the unreal perception that the many factors that unify the Arab people hardly stand the test of purely artificial sectarian differences.

This will only increase communal tensions and lay the ground for perpetual violence.

The lesson to be learned, once the crises are resolved, is that borders should be removed, or at least movement across the existing barriers should be facilitated, rather than introduce new ones.

The dream of Arab unity did not die and under different circumstances it may be successfully resuscitated.

Our problems in this region are not religious. Religion was wrongly drawn in the many political conflicts by misfits, criminals, opportunists, manipulators of the faith and outlaws.

Within a democratic context of justice, rule of law, fairness, equality and guaranteed dignity, all different people will be able to live together in complete harmony.